150 LIFE AND DEATH. 



in organisms similar to themselves. They grow, 

 evolve, and generate as they themselves weie 

 generated. In other words, while their acts separate 

 plants from animals, their mode of origin and 

 evolution alone bring them together. Such analogies 

 are of no slight importance ; but they were neutralized 

 by their dissimilarities, which were exaggerated by 

 f the dualistic school. 



It is clear that the word life would lose all actual 

 significance to those who would reduce it to the 

 faculty of evolution, and who would separate all its 

 real manifestations in animated beings and in plants. 

 If there are two lives, the one animal and the other 

 vegetable, there are no more ; or, what comes to the 

 same thing, there is an infinite number of lives which 

 have nothing in common but the name, or at most, 

 the possession of some secondary characteristics. 

 There are as many of them as there are different 

 beings, for each has its own particular evolution. 

 Here the specific is the negation of the general and 

 it destroys it instead of being subordinate to it. The 

 principle of life becomes for each being something as 

 individual as its own evolution. And this, if we 

 think it out, is how the philosophers look at life, and 

 it is the real reason of their disagreement with the 

 physiological school. 



- Proof of the Monistic TJieory, On the other hand, 

 under the disguise of living forms, the physiologist 

 recognizes the existence of an identical basis. His 

 trained ear marks amid the overcharged in- 

 strumentation of the vital work the recognizable 

 undertones of a constant theme. It was the work of 

 Claude Bernard to bring this common basis to 

 light. He shows that plants live as animals do, 



